Jeff Bezos was best known for founding eCommerce giant Amazon in 1994. However, the entrepreneur owns companies in several industries, including health care, retail, robotics, real estate, and media. Many of these companies have been acquired by Amazon over the years, but some have been the result of direct investment from Bezos himself (through his investment arm is called Bezos Expeditions).
Amazon
Amazon is a consumer e-commerce platform with a diversified business model spanning through e-commerce, cloud, advertising, streaming, and more. Over the years Amazon acquired several companies. Among its 12 subsidiaries, Amazon has AbeBooks.com, Audible, ComiXology, Fabric.com, IMDb, PillPack, Shopbop, Souq.com, Twitch, Whole Foods Market, Woot! and Zappos.
The success of Amazon is well documented, transforming from a small bookstore to a retail behemoth offering cloud services and streaming content among other things.
Some of the most well-known of the 40 Amazon subsidiaries include:
Audible – both a seller and producer of spoken audio entertainment.
Whole Foods Market – a supermarket chain selling organic food that was acquired by Amazon in 2017. Whole Foods is now fully integrated with the Prime membership program.
Zappos – a reputable online shoe marketplace that has been owned by Amazon since 2009.
Twitch Interactive – a live streaming service for gaming and esports competitions.
Digital Photography Review – a reputable website for all things photography established in 1998.
IMDB – internet movie database IMDB is also a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.
Amazon Robotics – formerly Kiva Systems, Amazon Robotics is a company that manufactures mobile robotic fulfillment systems. These systems are now exclusively used in Amazoninventorymanagement.
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is a major American newspaper that was acquired by Bezos for $250 million. The acquisition ended 42 years of the newspaper being part of a publicly-traded company.
Although the newspaper has been in print circulation since 1877, Bezos immediately shifted the focus to digital media to increase national and global readership.
Bezos Expeditions
Bezos Expeditions is the name given to the personal venture capital investments of Jeff Bezos.
Some of the selected investments by Bezos Expeditions (Source: bezosexpeditions.com)
Blue Origin
Blue Origin is an aerospace company founded in 2000 as a human spaceflight start-up. According to Bezos, it will be a key focus once he steps down from the Amazon CEO role in late 2021.
The primary goal of Blue Origin is to make space travel cheaper and more reliable. To that end, the Blue Origin moon lander is set to be fully operational by 2024.
AWS Elemental
AWS Elemental is a company owned by Amazon Web Services. Before the acquisition, it was known as Elemental Technologies.
AWS Elemental specializes in multiscreen video and creates software that performs video encoding, decoding, and transcoding. This software can be run in turnkey, virtualized deployment, and cloud-based models.
Key takeaways
Jeff Bezos is best known for his association with retail giant Amazon. The company also has a multitude of well-known and lesser-known subsidiaries including IMDB, Whole Foods Market, and Twitch.
Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and through Bezos Expeditions, has significant stakes in companies such as Google, Uber, and Airbnb.
Blue Origin is another Jeff Bezos-owned company which he hopes to devote more time to in the future. Blue Origin is seeking to make space travel more affordable and reliable.
A regret minimization framework is a business heuristic that enables you to make a decision, by projecting yourself in the future, at an old age, and visualize whether the regrets of missing an opportunity would hunt you down, vs. having taken the opportunity and failed. In short, if taking action and failing feels much better than regretting it, in the long run, that is when you’re ready to go!
A network effect is a phenomenon in which as more people or users join a platform, the more the value of the service offered by the platform improves for those joining afterward.
A platform business model generates value by enabling interactions between people, groups, and users by leveraging network effects. Platform business models usually comprise two sides: supply and demand. Kicking off the interactions between those two sides is one of the crucial elements for a platform business model’s success.
Customer obsession goes beyond quantitative and qualitative data about customers, and it moves around customers’ feedback to gather valuable insights. Those insights start by the entrepreneur’s wandering process, driven by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and a builder mindset. The product discovery moves around a building, reworking, experimenting, and iterating loop.
Amazon has a diversified business model. In 2021 Amazon posted over $469 billion in revenues and over $33 billion in net profits. Online stores contributed to over 47% of Amazon revenues, Third-party Seller Services, Amazon AWS, Subscription Services, Advertising revenues, and Physical Stores.
The Amazon organizational structure is predominantly hierarchical with elements of function-based structure and geographic divisions. While Amazon started as a lean, flat organization in its early years, it transitioned into a hierarchical organization with its jobs and functions clearly defined as it scaled.
In 2022, Amazon closed its divide in terms of total revenue, as it generated over $513 billion in revenue, compared to over $572 billion in revenue from Walmart.
In 2021, Amazon generated almost $470 billion in revenue, vs. eBay’s over $10.4 billion. In comparison, looking at revenues, Amazon was 45x times larger than eBay.
Amazon was not profitable once AWS was removed in 2022. In fact, Amazon, without AWS generated $10.6 billion in operating losses. While Amazon, without AWS, generated $12.2. billion operating income.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
